Okay, I suck, because I haven't been reading my flist. I have an excuse, really! I was behind on Supernatural, and I didn't want to get spoiled, and then by the time I caught up Star Trek had come out, and I didn't want to get spoiled on that either. And now that I've seen Star Trek I've got a lot of catching up to do.

So instead of that I'm going to do a meme. \o/

"Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes."

1. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (Too bad he's become such a sucky writer lately.)
2. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
3. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
4. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
5. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
6. Stranger at the Gate by Mel White
7. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
8. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (First book I can remember not being able to put down.)
9. The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom (Probably the first book I read about the Holocaust.)
10. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
11. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
12. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
13. Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
14. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (My mother used to read this to us when I was little.)
15. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder (I think this was my first chapter book. I remember reading it while I was in kindergarten, anyway.)

If you want, consider yourself tagged! I'd like to see other people's lists, and I'm going to go get caught up right now so I actually *will* see them.

And its highest ideals: Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably-Priced Love and a Hard-Boiled Egg!

Eoin Colfer has been chosen to write the sixth of the [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] series by Adams' widow Jane Belson.

Yes, apparently Douglas Adams said "I suspect at some point in the future I will write a sixth Hitchhiker book...I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note. Five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number." Which I hadn't realised. I thought he killed everyone at the end of the fifth on purpose, because he definitely planned to never write another one.

In theory, I suppose a sixth book would be cool. And I *like* Eoin Colfer, really. Artemis Fowl is one of my favorite young adult series. I have some problems with it, though. The books are getting a bit repetitive, and each book seems to be slightly worse than the last, to the point where most of the originality and fun of the first book has been drained out by unrealistic characterisation and deus ex machina. I continue to love them in spite of their flaws, let's say.

So why did she pick him?! I just...no. I don't see any way he can do this right. He's not the right author for this. Of course, it may be there is no right author for this, and she might have done better just licensing anyone to right in the Hitchhiker's universe or something (like Star Trek has basically done).

(What I really suspect is that Pratchett and Gaiman both said no, so here we are at Colfer. *cough*)

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

1. Maude Lebowski, The Big Lebowski
I've always had a little trouble with Maude. I like her, but I can't tell if the filmmakers intended her to be a real character or just a strawfeminist. She does some very strawfeminist things--saying "vagina" a lot to try to make the Dude uncomfortable, for example. But I think she really is a strong woman who's living her life the way she wants to. She likes to shock people, she doesn't care what people think, and she's not afraid to do things on her own (have a baby, for example). (BTW, my iPod is named "Maude".)

2. Mr. Universe, Serenity
The whole thing with his Real Doll bride is creepy. Other than that, though--Mr. Universe is funny. "Guy killed me, Mal! Killed me with a sword! How weird is that?" He betrays the crew of Serenity, but I think that's because his true allegiance is actually to "The Signal". He'd do anything to keep that from being shut down. I was a little annoyed when Joss introduced this character who had never even been mentioned in the series and acted like everyone knew who he was and he was a huge deal. But this is getting into Things About Serenity That Annoy Me.

3. Marissa Cooper, The O.C.
HATE. Oh my god so much hate. I only watched the first couple seasons of The O.C., so I never saw the part with her lesbian experiment or anything like that. But from the part I did see, Marissa is so shallow she'd drown in a puddle, she's a complete idiot, and she's bent on making everything about her to the point of ruining the lives of people she claims to care about. She was always more trouble than Ryan ever was.

4. Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly
Mal is hot. And I love how he loves his ship and the stars and can speak so poetically about them when he's in the right mood. But. He's *really* annoying, what with the whole, "you're part of my crew, no wait, now you're not, oh, now you are again", etc.

5. Moist von Lipvig, Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Moist is so freaking awesome. I love his view of being a scam artist, how it's about getting someone to do what you want them to do while making them think it was their idea. And he realises, after Vetinari gets to him, that you can do lawful things the same way, which is when he really puts his heart and soul into the post office. I also love how he has all these weird people around him, and he knows they're weird, and he just goes with it, playing to their strengths and accepting their idiosyncrasies.

I think this is a different list than the last time I did a "which of these books have you read" meme, so I'm totally going to do this one too! Yay me!

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

[Since there's no instructions on what to do for books you HATED WITH THE HEAT OF A THOUSAND BURNING SUNS, I will be adding comments in brackets to indicate those. Because I can't shut up on the internets. It's one of my many adorable traits.]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald [Just--yecch. I didn't completely *hate* this one, but it was close. To this day I remember very little about it at all. I think it was too gorram boring to make any lasting impression on my synapses.]
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [Yes, this would be one I hate with the heat of a thousand burning suns. I *get* that it's supposed to convey the hopelessness and everyday bleakness of the Dust Bowl, blah blah blah, but--it's all hopeless and bleak! And there's a whole CHAPTER about a TURTLE that's supposed to be SYMBOLIC but who CARES, and then there's a traumatizing scene involving the breast-feeding of a grown man, and then they all die. I guess. I was unclear on that point, but by then my ENTIRE WILL TO LIVE had been sapped, so trying to figure out the ending was of somewhat lesser importance. Imagine my hate when I discovered that picara DIDN'T READ this book and still got through the class. To think I could have gotten away with not reading it! *glares at picara*]
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac [I read 3/4ths of this and COULD NOT FINISH IT it annoyed me that much. I never do that. By the time I'm that far along, I finish it no matter how much is sucks. I think stream of consciousness is just really not for me.]
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola [Oh dear god. This would be another one I read ALL THE WAY THROUGH for my World History class in college, then discovered that I was probably the only one in class who had actually read it. I spent an ENTIRE WEEKEND being bored to tears by the plight of...mine workers? I think? somewhere I don't remember and never figuring out what it had to do with the ACTUAL CONTENT OF THE CLASS.]
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad [Okay. etumon, if she decides to comment, may show up and attempt to argue that this is actually a good book. She is WRONG, WRONG, SO VERY WRONG. This book is TORTURE in the form of symbolic windows and heads on spikes and RIVETS, oh god the rivets! Quitting now before I get caught in a flashback and never return.]
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

"[...] I told you them birds will steal anything that glitters."

"I'm not hurt at all," said Agnes pointedly. "The holly quite cushioned my fall."

From Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett. I'm working my way through all of Pratchett's books again, because I've realised I don't have them sufficiently memorised. I'm thinking I'll read The Fifth Elephant next. The witch books aren't actually my favorites, so this one is taking me a little longer to get through. The Watch books are my absolute favorites. I could read those again and again (I've probably read Night Watch a dozen times now, and I always have to reread it around the anniversary of the Glorious 25th of May.).

I'm not going to tag anyone, but it would be totally awesome if you want to do this meme. I like to see what other people are reading.

picara and I were discussing how we plan to get tattoos when we graduate. picara's would be something like the scales of justice, mine would be an open book with the pages flapping. My mother, the English teacher, (who thinks tattoos are stupid) heard this and interjected, "I'm going to get a tattoo of Shakespeare on my butt. It'll say 'But, soft!' "

We just about died laughing.

Then picara suggested it could say "What, Lucius, ho!" Because my mother's students, when they read Julius Caesar out loud, have been known to pronounce this "What luscious ho."

On Easter Sunday, etumon and I met in Ardmore and hung out, and it was awesome. (Even though there's very little to do in Ardmore, since there are 13 people who live there, all of whom are named "Frank." Even the girl!) I even brought my new digital camera, to record our exciting adventures! Unfortunately, on every one of those exciting adventures, I inadvertently left the camera in the car. Or forgot it was in my purse. However, despite those seemingly insurmountable problems, I am still able to provide a photolog of our meetup. Get ready for some exciting shots, folks!

We met at the Love's station on I-35. I was suitably impressed by the beigeness of etumon's new car, though I toned it down so as not to disturb the other people about, as you can see:

( look, look! )

Now, don't you feel like you were there?

Meme ganked from angelalala:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, strike through what you couldn't stand, and underline those you want to read. And, allow me to just further complicate matters a smidge: Make it green if you've never heard of it. Yay!

( to the list! )

My Mafia nickname is The Bishop. You may all address me as such from now on.

(It makes me think of the Stainless Steel Rat, particularly the scene in A Stainless Steel Rat is Born where Slippery Jim and the Bishop hide out in the kitchen of the automated fast food restaurant. The Bishop, nauseated, as I would be, by the thought of eating nothing but crappy fast food from the same restaurant for a month, declares that it will be a good opportunity for him to "reduce." Good times.)

The triumphant return! I have some adorable pictures of Zoe avoiding the snow, but I haven't uploaded them yet. So you'll just have to look forward to seeing those later.





"I thought you said there was a mouse!"





*hmph* "Had it with this sayee lo fake mouse. Flyin', me."

I'm reading a series of posts by guest-blogger Sara Robinson at Orcinus. It's a fascinating look at authoritarianism and what prompts people to leave authoritarian groups like fundamentalist religion. I don't know how interesting this is to anybody else, but I'm endlessly fascinated by what I guess you'd call the interplay between religion and sociology. What does religion do for us? What kinds of things change what we believe, or what our religion believes? What kind of things *should* change our religion and what shouldn't? I know that etumon, at least, has wanted to know what I actually believe, so hopefully at least one person will find some of this interesting.

( Unintentionally-long essay ahead )

I'm bored and I have a headache, so let's do this.

( Name meme )

I'm currently reading a book called Better Living Through Bad Movies, by the renowned minds that bring us World-O'-Crap. It's made of paper and contains words! Intrigued? Read on!

The book is along the same lines as Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese, except that the authors helpfully explain the lessons each movie is attempting to teach you. It's sort of like Inspector Gadget: "And so we learn that you shouldn't rub sand in your eyes, even though this episode had absolutely nothing to do with that."

Most of the movies they review are relatively recent (last 25 to 30 years), though I did see a handful of old ones that sounded like they could have come from the brilliant mind of Bert I. Gordon himself. (The Colossus of New York, anyone?) They also review such perennial favorites as Gymkata and Greydon Clark's Satan's Cheerleaders. Where for Mike Road House is the ultimate perfect movie, for these authors it's Red Dawn, which at least has the foresight to feature Patrick Swayze *and* include a charming scene in which the only way for Our Heroes to fix their truck is to urinate into the radiator.

You can read a bit of the introduction at the link below.

"President Woodrow Wilson recognized the enormous potential of motion pictures in 1915, when he observed, 'It’s like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true.' Of course, he was talking about Birth of a Nation, in which the heroes were Ku Klux Klansmen and the villains were white guys in blackface, so he might more accurately have said, 'It’s like writing history in the snow with your own pee, and my only regret is that I didn’t drink more beer.' Still, he makes a good point."

Enjoy, won't you?

Crossposted to mst3k.

P&P text only by skulll! *loves Jane Austen liek whoa*

I'm sitting on the porch reading my politics filter in order to get away from the stupidity that is Days of Our Lives. These two women with gigantic fanny packs are walking their dogs, and they've stopped in the neighbor's driveway and have been standing there for 10 minutes. It's very annoying. I don't get the point of the giant fanny packs either. Man. Remember when those were cool? Or did I just *think* they were cool? </dork>

I finished Stealing Jesus by Bruce Bawer earlier today. I highly recommend it for anyone who's interested in the origins of fundamentalism and what other kinds of Christians are out there. Part of the problem I've been having is that I knew I couldn't be a fundamentalist, but I'd somehow internalized the idea that fundamentalists are the "real" Christians and all others are fake. I didn't know there are, and have been for a long time, Christians and denominations that don't believe in biblical literalism, who don't proselytize by telling people they'll go to hell if they don't believe a certain set of doctrinal assertions. I don't know, still, what exactly I believe, but I kind of think that's just part of religion. Some things are mysteries, and religion isn't meant to answer every question we have. The point of religion is to bring us into contact with the spiritual. Anyway, read it if this is a subject that interests you.

I'm down in Denton trying to pack up some stuff and get a couple things dealt with (rent payment, mail forwarding, shutting off the Internet). So far I've managed to get very little done because I spent most of the day sleeping and then woke up with a headache. My own fault, but still. So I'm staying until tomorrow. I've been trying to pack some stuff tonight, and now I'm frustrated and want to die. I always manage to forget, from one move to the next, how much I hate packing. Especially the part where I have to decide which books I absolutely NEED and which I'm all right with being away from for awhile. (In case you're wondering, I have three boxes and a big bag of books to take back with me, and I'm battling separation anxiety where the rest of them are concerned.)

House tonight:
( SO MARRIED )

acostilow tagged me, so here goes:

( 5 guilty pleasures )

( 5 weird habits )

I'm bored, and I haven't updated in awhile, so let's do this.

( The Girly Meme )